Kimberly Gibson-Tran

Crossing I-75

It’s been a long first quarter

of violence and disappearances.

I’ve never felt so aware of God

and so reluctant to attend an Easter

service. I putter in sudden traffic,

hit the filter button. Exhaust

wafts up. There’s been, I'll bet,

an accident somewhere ahead,

which I’ve read happens more

on Texas highways than just

about anywhere. My last crash

was nine years back. The stats claim

I’m due to have the air smacked

out of me again. I wish I could

say I’m compassionate, but,

losing dollars off the clock, I, too,

start to fume, hear my own brain rot

that somebody better have paid

with his life to make us wait

this long. I punch off the radio,

which is trying to tell me about

an innocent man held in an American

concentration camp in a country

named for Jesus. Finally, Christ,

the flash of lights, the tow truck’s crucifix.

We cruise slowly on the loop.

Kimberly Gibson-Tran is an emerging writer who has over 40 published poems and essays—most of those within the last year. She studied linguistics and creative writing at Baylor University and the University of North Texas, writing critically, in her master’s thesis, about apprompted poems with "Lines by Someone Else." Her recent writing appears or is forthcoming in The Bombay Literary Magazine, Baltimore Review, Passages North, Porter House, Third Coast, Reed Magazine, Rowayat, and elsewhere. Raised by medical missionaries in Thailand, she now lives in Princeton, Texas. She is working on her first poetry manuscript, tentatively titled The Voyagers. Instagram. Bluesky. https://www.chillsubs.com/profile/kdawngibson